1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method whereby travelers can find and contact other travelers with similar and compatible travel plans in order to negotiate agreements to travel together.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The current state of the art in ride share systems includes bulletin boards such as college “ride boards”, batch processed match systems for car pooling, Internet chat rooms or discussion groups, and Web-based contact systems. In addition, two U.S. patents for public transportation systems include subsystems for matching riders with available vehicles.
Most of these systems cannot work with arbitrary geographic locations. For instance, commuter carpooling services work only in predefined metropolitan areas. College “ride boards” are similarly each tied to a particular campus. Some websites associated with specific events such as a concerts or conventions also promote ridesharing among attendees.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,360,875 to Behnke (1982) discloses a public transportation system that matches ride requests with ride offers within predefined geographical limits defined within a rectangular grid created for this purpose. U.S. Pat. No. 5,168,451 to Bolger (1992) discloses a transit system that similarly dispatches vehicles selected with the help of a predefined comprehensive matrix of all possible origins and destinations. U.S. Pat. No. 6,035,289 to Chou, Garg, and Yeh describes a method for matching carrier cargo capacities selected by time and capacity feasibility criteria and ranked by price. All of these patented systems limit origins and destinations to a predefined grid created as part of the patented system.
Rideshare systems not tied to specific locations suffer from the limitation of not being automatic. Users must manually scan through a lists and make comparisons. Not only is this tedious, but mistakes occur. A traveler from New York City to Washington D.C. for example, may fail to recognize the potential match with another traveler from Brooklyn, N.Y. to Vienna, Va. Examples of such systems include classified advertising in newspapers or other periodicals, online forums or “chat rooms”, and storefront operations such as Allostop in Canada (see http://www.allostop.com/english/default.htm).
Attempts to overcome these problems have resulted in interactive Websites using zones or grids like the cited patented systems. These designs suffer from the dilemma that a coarse-grained grid offers poor matching precision while a fine-grained grid requires a significant manual effort. Further, potential matches go unrecognized when candidate and target origins or destinations happen to straddle grid boundaries. Examples of these systems are at http://www.rideboard.com, http://shareride.com, http://www.campuswired.com, http://www.union.uiuc.edu/rb, http://www.rejsecenter.net/klik/europa, http://www.karpool.com, and http://www.mainquad.com/htmis/worp/DEADJOE
These problems limit the number of travel plans that clients will post to a database, which in turn reduces the likelihood that other clients will find matches. This recursive “critical mass” phenomenon has further limited the success of ride sharing despite is considerable inherent advantages.